NeoCities Wants to Save Us From the Crushing Boredom of Social Networking

Relive the good ole days of the interwebs. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

GeoCities, the old free web hosting site from the 1990s, was amazingly ahead of its time. It did obsessiveness before Tumblr, self-infatuation before Facebook, and sorry Reddit, GeoCities straight-up ruled at GIFs. It wasn’t often pretty, but it was always interesting. But then Yahoo bought GeoCities, proceeded to run it into the ground, and eventually shut it down everywhere other than Japan. Today, a new venture wants to bring it, or at least its culture, back.

NeoCities is a new hosting service, launched June 28, that gives users 10 megabytes of free space along with a basic HTML editor to create a website. To create a site, people will need to learn rudimentary HTML–just as they did with GeoCities. Developer Kyle Drake acknowledges that this isn’t for everyone, but thinks there needs to be an alternative to the current pre-formatted, template-driven, standardizing platforms, which make it easy to have a web presence, but hard to make that presence your own. “If you look at sites like Facebook,” he says, “they control the type, shape, and arrangement of the content you contribute, and deviation is not possible.”

Basically, Drake hopes people will use it to make the Web more interesting. The beauty of NeoCities, says Drake, is that it bucks the “collective mentality that you can’t make real sites without complicated back-end servers.” Although he chose the size limit to keep things affordable, he says “it was also a suggestion that you can do a lot with a small amount of space.”

That’s true. For example, Wired’s homepage clocks in at a mere 3.5 megabytes. And, thanks to CSS, web design is also exponentially more flexible than it was in GeoCities’ era. So despite the paltry 10 megabyte limit (GeoCities gave away 11 megabytes in 1997), a NeoCities page can host beautiful, intelligent, and, well, downright weird content. So much for dancing babies.

Drake thinks this combination of the old web’s spirit and the new web’s maturity will encourage users to let their freak flags fly. He’s aware that tying his project to GeoCities might cause it to collapse under the weight of nostalgia, or worse, drown in a flood of irony. But, he’s hopeful that people will see his project’s real potential and actuallymakecoolsites.